Low-power radio beacons, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons, transmit information that is used by an application on a mobile device to provide location-relevant and/or context relevant information to a user. BLE beacons can also be used as tags for asset tracking of portable or mobile assets. Whether a computing device is a mobile device that is determining its location relative to a fixed BLE beacon or the computing device is an asset tracking device that is determining the location of a BLE tag, a Bluetooth transceiver in the computing device receives a Bluetooth radio frequency (RF) signal from the beacon and samples the Bluetooth RF signal to produce sample data that is used to calculate an Angle of Arrival (AoA) of the received Bluetooth RF signal. The Bluetooth transceiver provides the sample data to a location service executing on a host processor in the computing device, which uses the data to calculate the AoA of the Bluetooth RF signal relative to the computing device. Applications executing on the computing device use the generated AoA as part of location or positioning algorithms, such as triangulation, to calculate the location of the mobile device or a tagged asset.
Typically, a Bluetooth transceiver has limited computational capabilities that are sufficient for performing Bluetooth operations, including sampling the Bluetooth RF signal to provide data for the AoA generation, but are insufficient to perform the AoA generation while providing timely positioning updates to consuming applications on the computing device. The AoA calculation is performed more quickly using the greater computational capabilities of the host processor of the computing device. However, for each AoA that is generated by the location service on the host processor, a set of AoA sample data is transferred across an interface between the Bluetooth transceiver and the host processor. As applications use increasing numbers of beacon signals to accurately triangulate location, the increasing transfer of samples for AoA generation can tax the throughput of the interface between the Bluetooth transceiver and the host processor. This throughput limitation can affect the performance of positioning and location-based applications executing on the host processor and can affect the responsiveness a user experiences for positioning updates on a mobile device.